'She's talking to that mirror again, farther?' says Misst Craddock. Father Cradock turns round slowly from the book he is eating and explains that it is just a face she is going through and they're all the same at that age.

Friday, August 03, 2007

Born in Belgrade in 1938, he knew war as a child. “Germans and the Allies took turns dropping bombs on my head while I played with my collection of lead soldiers on the floor,” Simic told The Cortland Review. “I would go boom, boom, and then they would go boom, boom.”

And he said in the Times today: “I’m sort of the product of history; Hitler and Stalin were my travel agents.”

Actually, I'm not sure what the job of the Poet Laureate is - I think I've been biased against the post in general ever since Wordsworth.

And I have to say I'm not sure it's such a bad thing that India doesn't have one. If the presidential election is anything to go by there's no chance of our actually getting someone decent. Anyone worth reading would probably fall foul of the moral police. And there's the obvious language problem involved.

On the whole, I'd say what we need much more than a Poet Laureate is a couple of decent (preferably online) journals that publish genuinely good poetry.

Falstaff: yeah, I read a poem Andrew Motion wrote during some royal thingy and it was terrible. And I guess, since it's all so pointless anyway, that Kalam was more of a Poet Laureate than a President.

How depressing.

Online journals and genuione poetry is a whole other matter, though. :D